


Coping Mechanisms

by drinkbloodlikewine



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Drinking, Gen, Past Violence, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:35:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>from an anonymous prompt request: "a love letter from Chilton to his missing organ"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coping Mechanisms

**Author's Note:**

> The Hannibal-ACCA website has permission to post this piece <3

His therapist said he needed an outlet to express how he felt. His therapist also said that suppressing unpleasant thoughts could lead to larger issues down the road, and that traumatic events should be examined fully, rather than avoided.

His therapist was full of shit.

Frederick swirled a glass of scotch, golden-hued and earthy in nose, staring down the blank page as though to make words appear on it. He glanced at his computer, screen showing still life images of the hospital at nighttime in flickering greys. Frowning, he closed the screen and rose from his plush leather desk chair, carrying the laptop away from his desk and tossing it onto the couch instead. No more distractions.

To his dismay, as he limped back to his desk, the yellow legal pad hadn’t gained any words. He loomed over it, taking a swig of the heady single-malt.

“This is stupid,” Frederick announced to no one.

She’d told him to write a letter about his experience. Not typed, handwritten, so that he could connect on a deeper level to emotions that he had tried to ignore. She’d have been fired on the spot if he’d heard her saying crap like that to a patient of his, but the board had insisted that she was the best possible candidate to walk him through the healing process.

His protestations had been disregarded entirely. Of course.

If he’d spent his life in overexamination of every bit of bad luck that came his way, he’d never have managed to become chief administrator of one of the most unique hospitals in the entire country. Hell, he’d probably never have made it out of med school. Looking out for one’s best interest meant he’d never played well with others, even if they were secretly playing the same game. Unfortunately, certain teachers had taken affront with his penchant for dismantling their papers with his own, and they were the ones that settled his scores.

Until he settled them himself, anyway. It was fascinating, the things you could learn from members of the student body who regularly found themselves fraternizing with professors, especially when those professors in turn found themselves fraternizing with other students.

Still, even Frederick had to acknowledge that there was rather a difference between blackmailing smug academics to give you the grades you deserved, and holding your own bowels in your arms as a former patient ran off with one of your kidneys.

One of them made you feel poorly afterwards.

He picked up his pen and chewed the end of it, twisting in his chair. He could always just not write it. Show up tomorrow and tell his therapist that he had actual work to do, actually helping people. She’d give him that patronizing I-expected-more-from-you look of disappointment again, which he could live with. What he couldn’t live with was knowing that she’d turn right around and report him to the board for being uncooperative.

“Dear,” he started writing, and then stopped. Dear who?

Dear Ms. Lounds, thanks for helping me squish my intestines back in?

Dear Abel, I hope you choked on it?

“Dear kidney,” he wrote, smirking. “A lot has changed since you’ve been gone.”

He congratulated his own cleverness with another sip of scotch.

“I’ve started eating better. Long past are evenings of fine cuts of beef, rich porkchops, or savory barbeque ribs. Now my nights are spent with kale, kale, and more kale, occasionally followed by an additional serving of kale.”

He tapped his pen on the pad of paper.

“But you’ll be glad to know that they caught the man who took you. Not quickly enough to save you - the FBI can only be so effective, after all - but they seemed pleased with themselves and he’s been sent away now. He went down with a bullet, at least. I hope he misses that bit of flesh the way that I miss you.”

Another sip of scotch, frowning slightly at the page.

“Were I more literary-minded, I would be able to better express how your loss has affected me. Of course, it wouldn’t matter, as you’re already gone and no one here particularly cares. It’s just too much fun for them to laugh about kidney pies and kidney beans and give cute little nicknames to the cane I have to carry because the pain in my side is so intense sometimes that I can barely stand.” He poured himself a bigger glass of the expensive liquor.

“It’s not a horror, kidney. It’s a joke. Clearly I let myself be kidnapped, operated on in an unsanitary observatory by a mental patient, and arranged to have parts of myself removed before being left to die. Easy come, easy go, as they say, and certainly this bit of half-assed sophomore-year therapy will repair any lingering ill feelings I have.”

“Yes, with any luck this little letter will turn everything right around. I won’t wake up every hour of the night to use the restroom, because your partner is doing all the work now. I won’t come to work exhausted each day. I won’t feel a twinge in my back every time I stand up, sit down, sneeze, piss, or really do anything at all.”

“Yes, dear kidney - this will make everything right as rain.”

He drank the entire glass down at once, propped his pen in his mouth, and tore the letter free of the notepad. The liquor burned deep as he crumpled up the page and threw it into the trash. Tomorrow he’d just tell her that he didn’t have the time to complete her assignment. Let her take it up with the board.

It wasn’t as though his information gathering was reserved only for patients.


End file.
